Soon, the meetings will resume (I hear that phrase as “soon, the beatings will resume”). I do believe meetings at the university level have been infiltrated by CIA moles, because these instructions sure look familiar.

I think every leftist should pass this around once or twice a year just so we're all on the same page: from recently WW-II era CIA "Simple Sabotage Field Manual", guidelines for how to disrupt organizations. pic.twitter.com/xflDagwpIr

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@OlufemiOTaiwo) January 20, 2022

Our biology discipline meetings aren’t bad — we’re a small department, I don’t think we’ve been given our CIA plant yet, so they usually get down to business reasonably efficiently. As soon as we get into larger groupings, though, all of the above kicks into action, especially #2 and #5. Meanwhile, I tend to just sit quietly, thinking more productively about the work I need to get done.

I do wonder what the CIA’s intent with poisoning academia with these tedious bores might be, though.

I know my syllabi are mostly ignored, and I expect to see more examples in the next week: some students will read it at the last moment as they desperately look for loopholes and ways to scrape up more points, and I will get letter-of-the-law emails attempts to justify why they should get more credit. But Professor Kenyon Wilson of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga came up with a more direct test: he put a fifty dollar bill in a locker and inserted directions to it in his syllabus. He wasn’t subtle about it either. It’s an explicit set of directions to the locker in a parenthetical sentence.

It wasn’t even cryptic or clever! Nobody had to decode anything! And the result…

The Tennessee music professor slipped a $50 US bill into a locker on his campus, and buried the location and combination in the syllabus for his performing arts seminar class.

The semester is over. The students have gone home. The cash remains unclaimed.

His syllabus is only 3 pages long!

Wilson says he’s long suspected his syllabus goes mostly unread, even though he always tells his students to read it through. It’s an online document, about three pages in length, outlining course expectations, grading scales and other bits of what Wilson calls “boilerplate language.”

Mine is 5 or 6 pages, making it even worse. I blame that goddamned “boilerplate language.” Every once in a while, the administration tells us that we ought to include X, Y, or Z in our syllabus, and they helpfully send us a paragraph or three that they’ve written in fluent bureaucratese, and I obey, so the bloat grows and grows. I don’t think I’ve read most of my syllabi myself — I just copy and paste what I’m told ought to be in there. I am not surprised that the students have learned that the bulk of our syllabi are mind-numbingly irrelevant repetitious hash.

Fortunately, I was just yesterday poking at my genetics syllabus, half-heartedly adjusting a few dates to bring it in line with 2022, totally uninspired but needing to take advantage of my few days of respite before the grading slams me in the face again this weekend. But now I have a goal. I’m going to rip out all the boilerplate and stuff it into a separate document so it’s available, but also easily ignorable. Then I’m going to write a short punchy summary with only the essential stuff, and get that down to under a page. I can do it. I know what the students need to know, and I also know what other professors need to know if they’re looking at my course to evaluate it for transfer credits.

I’m not going to repeat the trick of hiding a treasure map inside it, though. Sorry, students!

And it is fading. The early ebullience from people like Bari Weiss is diminishing, and the only news about it I can find is that Niall Ferguson seems to be frantically touring right-wing podcasts to claim it’s really going to happen, which it isn’t. But I still see the occasional lefty chortling over the ridiculous concept. Like this one:

That those too-hot ideas—among them the celebration of free-market capitalism, eugenics and white supremacy, xenophobia, and transphobia, per the résumés of some of UATX’s founding trustees and advisors—are also cultural hegemonies championed by the richest and most powerful people and institutions thriving today in the Western world does not seem to be a problem for these self-styled revolutionaries. And why should it? This dippy bunch is not actually engaging in a genuine paradigm shift in the ivory tower; think of it more like the University of Pity Party at Austin.

Of course this project is silly. It’s brought to you by a group of wealthy—some of them mind-blowingly so—elites who are mostly known for whining about “cancel culture” and being rewarded handsomely for it. The very premise of UATX is preposterous, predicated on a subset of highly successful and privileged people’s unseemly thirst to be cast as victims in a grand narrative of—hilariously enough—intellectual and economic oppression. This scrappy underdog “university’s” board of advisors includes Larry Summers, former secretary of the treasury and president emeritus of a little college in Boston called Harvard (perhaps you’ve heard of it?). Other founders and advisors are professionally affiliated with Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, and UATX’s seed money flows forth from tech bro Joe “paternity leave is for losers” Lonsdale, a venture capitalist who co-founded the creepy surveillance/data-mining software company Palantir.

“Pity Party University”…that’s about right. But then, getting serious about it, the author says:

In contrast to the sharp rebuffs of my peers, I rarely experienced anything but the mildest pushback from left-leaning faculty. Far from being pressured to conform to left-wing groupthink by a socialist academic cabal, I got excellent grades and I was encouraged to share my ideas—offensive and ill-considered as they undoubtedly were—in class discussions. Oh, I had brilliant professors who planted seeds that would flower years later, but at the time, my own views hardly shifted. To the contrary (I was, after all, a contrarian) I dug in harder, sure that I was a powerful voice for the preservation of good old-fashioned American ideals, a bold defender of capitalism and the free market.

That’s the thing about the conservatives’ claims about those darned liberal universities. You read this blog, you know that I’m pretty fiercely partisan and that I despise Republicans with all my heart, but that doesn’t translate to how I manage a classroom. Like she says, your typical lefty professor encourages students “to share [their] ideas—offensive and ill-considered as they undoubtedly were”. We’re not interested in silencing, but in exposing.

The idea that we’d shout down conservatives and not let them speak is simply right-wing projection. That’s what they do.

As has become increasingly typical, I was up late last night grading exams, rather than reading a good book or watching a movie or going for a walk, like normal people do, and I was getting a little bit frustrated. This was an exam for an introductory biology course, all first year students, and it was fairly straightforward: about 40% multiple choice questions, the rest being short “essay” style questions that had to be answered with a coherent paragraph. I had questions like, “explain the difference between methodological and philosophical materialism” (yeah, there was some baby philosophy in this course) and “summarize the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant”, all stuff that we’d discussed in class, and if they’d missed class, it was there in the lecture notes I’d posted online, and which they should have studied.

You will be shocked and surprised to learn that some of them had not studied.

What annoyed me, though, and ate up a lot of my time, was when desperate students who had not studied tried to bullshit their way through an answer, throwing out vaguely recalled terms, hoping that some of them stick. The Grants, for instance, who actually did work on finch beaks and adaptation, were assigned to have worked on Galapagos tortoises or iguanas, and seemed to have compiled a taxonomic catalog of random, memorable animals on the islands. You don’t even want to know what kind of inventions they created to explain away the philosophy or history of science, or how the Cambrian was after the Cretaceous. It was ludicrous errors of fact and random word association games, and worst of all, I had to carefully read it all to see if there was a glimmering of an echo of a shadow of comprehension in there, and give them points for it. Ick.

I think I was muttering to myself something like “why don’t you just admit you didn’t know the answer” when I had my idea. In the very first lecture in this course I had talked to them about the value of asking good questions, and how it’s acceptable for a scientist to say “I don’t know” when they don’t have a good answer, and I thought, I should encourage them to admit when they don’t know the answer, especially since I have a pretty good bullshit detector. So I’ve invented a new policy I’ll announce to them.

If you don’t know the answer to an exam question, just write “I don’t know” and I’ll give you 25% of the points. It’s that easy! It’ll save me the agony of trying to interpret word salad, which generally earns 0 points anyway, and you’ll get a few points for honesty. Everyone wins!

Of course, 25% is not adequate to pass the course — 50% earns a “D” grade — so you can’t expect to slide through by answering “I don’t know” to everything, but if you hit one or two questions you’re drawing a blank on, it’ll spare you some anxiety and suffering, and me some exasperation, if you can just dismiss the question and move on. It’s also fitting with a major theme of the course, which is about how scientists do science and how we came to understand principles of evolution, genetics, and development.

I’ve only been teaching for a few decades before I thought of this simple solution to a chronic problem.

I slept in until 8:30. I have now lingered over my coffee for a whole hour. Time to get to work!

• Get my shoes on. (this is a major thermodynamic hurdle — I’m hoping the coffee provided enough activation energy to get the process started.)
• Walk out the door to the lab. Usually by this point the reaction is mildly exothermic so it should go smoothly.
• Say hello to the grass spiders living in the shrubbery outside my lab.
• Feed all the spiders inside my lab.
• Walk home.
• Stretch. Crack my knuckles. Open up all the lab reports my students submitted to Canvas last night. Stare at them, mildly stupefied.
• Start grading them, eventually. Do that all afternoon.
• Return to awareness. Eat dinner. Wonder where the day went.

Tomorrow they turn in a homework assignment, and I’ll do exactly the same routine on Monday.

The bee don’t care about deadlines either, she’s just doing her thing.

There’s one thing my students haven’t quite figured out yet. I do set deadlines on all the assignments, because the software requires it, but…I don’t care. I just want them to do the work so they know how to do the work, and so I can see where maybe they’re going down the wrong path, but deadlines are an invention of The Man (or maybe Satan). Try to turn things in on time so they don’t pile up on you, but if it’s a few days late, I’m OK with that.

But these are all conscientious Midwestern kids, many of them first generation college students, so I get an amazing flood of email the day of, full of apologies and reasons why they didn’t meet the deadline, which I have to read, too. I get all these panicky messages sent just before midnight, “oh no I couldn’t solve this problem, I’m struggling with it, I can’t get it done on time” followed by a 3am follow-up, “I figured it out, I submitted it a little late, I hope that’s OK”.

I just want to say…Dudes. It’s fine. The software sets this specific 11:59pm deadline minute, but I’m sleeping then. I’m not hovering over the computer, ready to dock points from anyone who turns it in at 12:01am. Or even noon the next day. The only real deadline is when I go over the answers in class a few days later, because I want you to think them through yourself, rather than getting handed them. If you turn something in a little late, well, that’s a time-management issue you should work on, but I’m going to pretend it was turned in precisely on time and give you full credit, because I don’t care. All I care about is whether you learned the subject matter.

I guess I’d have to worry if every student procrastinated and I couldn’t get the bulk of the grading done at the time I set aside for it, but that hasn’t happened yet in 40 years, and the Midwestern work ethic means it’s not going to happen in the near future. Chill. Go for a walk. Enjoy the flowers and the spiders while you can. Biology isn’t a punishment drill, it’s supposed to be something that makes you happy.